Anyone else getting a ton of hitches? When I get in towns w/ lots of characters my frames are dropping to 15. Really choppy.

Welcome to Vanguards... thats normal. Turn down your graphics slightly and it will run better, I basically made my draw distance alot closer. In the desert the game would render ALOT an kills performance bad.

Inside the castle.. 10fps.. geezus. And I've turned down detail to "high" from "super high" , turned down specular, lighting, shader quality. Just what the f*** is it going to take? It just pauses and hitches out of the blue for no reason.

A shame, because this game looks really good, I think. Is it a problem w/ SLI you think? Does it run better on one GTX?

Inside the castle.. 10fps.. geezus. And I've turned down detail to "high" from "super high" , turned down specular, lighting, shader quality. Just what the f*** is it going to take? It just pauses and hitches out of the blue for no reason.

A shame, because this game looks really good, I think. Is it a problem w/ SLI you think? Does it run better on one GTX?

Vanguard doesn't like SLI

When I had a 7900GTX, it ran better on it than my 7950GX2. Try just one card.

I just wonder if it even has anything to do with graphics settings, because the only time it slows to a crawl is with lots of characters on-screen. I mean, inside the castle in that room where you look up and see the stars on the ceiling it was crawling along ~10fps, and there's nothing graphically splendor about that room. No great draw distance to worry about. It's just a room. But there were about 10 characters on-screen at once.

I'll probably be on there again tonight. I love the game, but these slowdowns/hitches are really killing the experience. I hope they're able to get it fixed.

Hey Magus, what SLI rendering mode are you using? I'm just running default.

Default aswell. The thing is, like many MMOs is that if you disable a graphics setting, even when it isn't on screen it could affect performance. I remember how disabling some water effects in EQ2 would improve performance even when there was no water to be rendered...

Hey, I think I've found something that helps. I have everything turned up all the way right now except shadow detail. I cut that down half-way and I'm getting a low of 30fps in populated areas compared to 15 before. I also unchecked "hardware occlusion" as it seemed to do nothing but cause more pauses/stuttering.

I haven't walked back in the castle, though. I've just now found this one place--damnit, can't remember the name now--but it looks like a snow mountain and it has these dragons flying all around. Man, this was awesome.

Detail on the dragons is impressive. Their skin is scaly and it even stretches when they move around.